It’s been a while since my last post, but I’ve been quite busy. Aside from the holidays, moving and being out of town, work’s been extremely hectic too. However, at Shop.org’s First Look conference recently, I came up with lots of blogging ideas, so hopefully I’ll be a bit more active in the coming weeks. (See, you can relax now)

Today, however, some catching up from the holidays. I ordered a number of items from Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and my experiences were far from optimal. Interestingly, before the holidays, Carrie Johnson of Forrester predicted that customer satisfaction with online shipping would to go down this holiday season. And, although satisfaction in general continued to rise this year (according to numbers from Shop.org), from my own experiences Carrie was right on the money.

A quick recap of my experiences:

BN.com
Although Barnes & Noble’s prices really don’t compete with amazon’s (in most cases), in previous years I have relied on them because of their superior shipping. Since the warehouse is (was?) just up the road in Cranbury, NJ, and BN.com ships same day, I typically received orders the day after they were placed, or perhaps the 2nd day. It was Saturday 12/10 and I needed a few books for a work “Secret Santa” on the 16th. BN.com was a bit pricer, but I knew I’d have the books by Wednesday, so I placed the order. On Tuesday, I received an email saying that my order had shipped. What took 4 days, I wondered? I know I ordered on Saturday, but the e-commerce company I work for was going 24/7 to get holiday orders out, and frankly I expected BN.com to be the same. Still, I figured the items would arrive by Thursday at the latest, probably Wednesday, and I’d be fine. Well, I wasn’t. One of the items arrived Thursday, the other did not. So, I emailed their customer service (quite bitterly I might add). It took about 4 days to get back to me, but they refunded my money. Still, the party came and went and I didn’t have the gift I ordered.

BTW, the item arrived on January 6th. At least I didn’t pay for it.

Amazon.com
I purchased a number of items from amazon.com on December 13th using their free “super saver” shipping. This was well ahead of the posted super saver cutoff date (and the estimated delivery dates were all before Xmas), so I was quite confident that my order would arrive on time. On the 18th, I received an email informing me that my order had been delayed, but was still expected to arrive in time for Xmas. I was still quite confident. Unfortunately, I received a second email on 12/22 informing me my order had been delayed AGAIN. Mind you, this was Thursday and my order was shipping UPS, so Friday was the last possible day I could recieve it in time for the holiday. I was, as you might imagine, quite preterbed by this. So, I immediately fired off an email to amazon demanding to know what the heck was going on with my order. How dare they tell me this close to Xmas that I might not receive my stuff! This was in the morning, before I left for work. About an hour later, at work, I checked my email. Amazon had responded, apologizing, saying that they were still confident that I would receive my package. Still, because of the poor experience, they were including a $10 credit to my account.

I received the items the following day, 12/23.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 5:09 pm and is filed under customer service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.